


the light isn't fading

by haloud



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Love, M/M, Pining, Sickfic, emetophobia cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 14:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21340063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: There’s only one comfort that’s ever meant anything at all, and if the world is upside down, with no way to know when or if he’ll be getting any better. Sick and hurting and scared, Michael wants only one thing, one person, even if it’s selfish.
Relationships: Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Comments: 47
Kudos: 235





	the light isn't fading

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from hold on by chord overstreet

Everything is wrong.

Michael’s eyes can’t focus and he doesn’t know if he’s just more drunk than he ought to be, if he’s been drugged, or if he’s just dying. He didn’t think he’d had that much; for most of the night he’d stuck to beer, and the acetone’d stayed stowed away. Anyway, this doesn’t feel like normal drunk, this feeling like he won’t be sure if he’s upright or if he’s crumpled on the floor until he tries to take the next step.

There’s nothing holding his atoms together; there’s nothing holding him in place; he’s left without so much as an instinctual trust in gravity.

He could say something to Maria—if he’s been dosed with something here, in _her _bar, she’ll make sure there’s hell to pay, and she’ll call—who to call? Liz and Valenti, maybe? Like they know his body better than him. And he doesn’t know anything at all. But Maria is working a bar ten deep, and her smile has been tight and stressed all night, and if Michael can just make it back to his truck he can try and sleep this off and he’ll be—fine.

It’s more muscle memory than anything else that carries him weaving and stumbling around tables and chairs and people out into the parking lot of the Pony. If he can just make it to his truck, he can collapse in the back and curl up in a ball until the world stops spinning. Each step is torturous. The gravel ripples and peaks under his feet like choppy waves and his legs almost give out at the knee and ankle every time he tries to move. It would be a relief to fall through and drown with his lungs full of rock and sand. He always said it would be Earth that killed him, and the thought is funny enough that he barks out a too-loud laugh, though he has to clamp his mouth shut after one before he vomits all over the ground.

The familiar shape of his truck wobbles in front of him, and he reaches out groping to grasp the side of the bed. The metal should be freezing after sitting out in the night but his hands are already so cold it barely registers. Everything inside him feel watery and rotten and he just wants it to—

He drags his jacket tighter around himself with his right hand. He can’t seem to make the left do anything, even though it doesn’t hurt, even though he’s had—time to—he’s gotten—even though Max—

Anyway.

He drags his jacket tighter around himself like that might warm him up, and he should reach for a blanket to stop his shaking instead, but the thought of moving is too much for his scrambled brain to handle. He’s safe and still in his truck, now, even though everything is still spinning, but he’s safe enough to close his eyes against it. The vertigo fucks ruthlessly with his ability to pull anything to him with his TK; like this, he’s as likely to send it flying into the next county.

All he can do is huddle in the corner of his truck bed, head on his knees, hands shaking from the cold and the jittering nausea, gasping sour little breaths that don’t do nearly enough to get oxygen to his system, and pray for it to—

_Stop, _he thinks, a one-word mantra, and then he wonders if Max and Isobel—if they’re like this too. He fumbles in his pocket for his phone, but he can’t read anything on the screen, and it hasn’t buzzed in hours since he posted up at the Pony and—he should have called for Maria before leaving, because she’s good and she would help him but he doesn’t want to do that to her, not when he’s already—when he’s done enough. She may have wanted him to stick around as a—friend—and threatened to make his life hell if he threw her over for another bar, but that doesn’t mean he has the right to ask her to take care of him.

Isobel and Max. Are they okay? Are they like—this—too? If they need him and he’s not there, if whatever this is has kept him from feeling either of them cry out then how will he—what will tomorrow be like if they’re—he’s lost them both already, then had them, then lost them, in an uneven cycle that never lets his grief grow a common orbit, and now, and now that things are starting to settle, if they’re calling for him and he can’t feel it he doesn’t know how he’ll go on.

Can_ they_ feel _him_? Can they feel the dissolving in his chest, the awful wrongness in his skull? A little part of him, the part that’s sick and plaintive and crying, wants one of them to come like no one ever has, any time he’s been hurting. He thinks they probably can’t feel him. Some combination of trauma at formative stages has him cut off or something. He’s thought of ways to test it but never come up with anything that didn’t involve hurting himself, and he’s never been willing to go that far, and even if he was now he doesn’t have the strength left anymore.

Is this how Isobel felt with that serum in her veins? Michael couldn’t feel her like Max could, so he has no idea, not even the vaguest shadow, of what that coldness was like. He has no one to feel him now, and it’s a razor’s edge of comfort that if he has to feel this at least he’s not leaving it imprinted in anyone else’s neurons, in anyone else’s veins.

He wants. There’s only one comfort that’s ever meant anything at all, and if the world is upside down, with no way to know when or if he’ll be getting any better, Michael wants only one thing, one person, even if it’s selfish, he wants Alex there with him, wants to be held against Alex’s chest, enveloped by the smell of him, lulled to sleep by the electricity under his skin.

But Alex wouldn’t want to see him like this. And Michael would never ask that of him.

He takes a deep shuddering breath and curls his hands—though the left doesn’t do much more than a stiff twitch at the fingers—into his thighs with bruising strength. Ride the wave. He’s never been sick but he has been hungover and he has puked up his guts in the ear-ringing heart-pounding aftermath of an extraterrestrial outburst, and he got motionsick the first time Isobel pulled him into her mindscape. He can do this, if he counts his breaths and tries to sleep. Worst that’ll happen is he gets woken up by a car alarm or by someone from the bar telling him to take a hike, and then he’ll call, he’ll call someone, he’ll make his fingers work on his phone and try his best.

“—in. Guerin!”

Maria’s voice pierces the awful sluggish haze in his brain. He opens his eyes the best he can, still squinting, trying to make his eyes make sense of what’s in front of him. Maria is kneeling on the bed beside him, and she reaches out to grab his face, tilting his head from side to side, and he stays limp and lets her.

“You’re not drunk,” she says. “What the hell happened to you, Guerin?”

“Sick.”

“Sick? Can you even _get _sick? You look _awful. _I’m calling Isobel, I’m calling—someone.”

“Maria…” He tries to protest, but she shushes him. She doesn’t seem to know where to put her hands; they flutter around his face for a second, glance through his sweaty hair, then one hand finally settles in a death grip on his knee as she fishes her phone out of her pocket.

_Don’t call, _he wants to say, but what else is he going to do. He certainly isn’t getting anywhere under his own power anytime soon.

“Michael’s sick,” she says, sans greeting, “He’s in the parking lot—no, it’s only like midnight, how long do you think it takes to get this sick from drinking, and anyway, all he had was—I don’t _know, _but,” she reaches up to push his hair off his forehead, but this time he doesn’t even try to look at her, “He looks bad, Iz. I don’t know. Yeah. Ok. Ok, you call Max, and I’ll call Alex. Ok. Get here quick, Iz.”

Maria’s voice, the tinny sound of Isobel on the other end of the line, the noise spilling out of the Pony and into the night, the occasional passing car—Michael’s head is too jumbled, too heavy and slow even to differentiate one from the other, and all of them make him want to cover his ears and curl back into a ball, and the idea of that many people, of Maria and Iz and Max and Alex and all of them hovering over him has him—he wants to cry, almost, and more than anything else wants to _escape, _wants to find a dark place to hole up until this passes, where everyone will forget him, where no one will try to ask what’s wrong.

_Alex, _he thinks, and wants.

He buries his head back in his knees, dislodging Maria’s hand, and she moves it to rest on his back. He flinches, feeling too raw beneath his clothes, and that touch jerks away, but she won’t leave him, that’s not Maria, but if his tongue wasn’t two sizes too big for his mouth he’d ask her to walk away to call—because his stomach rolls at the thought of hearing Alex’s voice, with longing and with dread.

All he wants is Alex, the steadiness of him, a fixed point in a melting universe, the opposite of an oasis because it’s everything else that shimmers like a mirage. But for Alex to see him like this, he doesn’t know—

“I’m with him right now,” Maria is saying. “Yeah, the Pony. Wait, really? Okay. We’re in his truck. _Hurry._”

The world tunnels after that, stretched and black and seasick.

Next thing, he’s conscious enough to wrangle the sensation of the road beneath the tires of his truck, tucked into the corner of the bench seat, pressed up to the freezing steel of the passenger side door and shaking, shaking hard enough to rattle his teeth. Fists stuffed under his arms, body hunched around his core, but he still can’t get warm, and he’s always been warm, and everything is _wrong. _

The person driving—it _might _be Alex, but Michael wouldn’t put anything past the acid, fogged-up world, and he knows his mind well enough to know that under emergency protocol Alex is bound to be the first thing he hallucinates—doesn’t say a word, just keeps their foot on the floor, hurtling them down the wavy street, the headlights cutting a migraine swath through the blackness until Michael closes his eyes and stops fighting vertigo. It doesn’t matter who it is beside him. If his brain tells him it’s Alex, he’s going to close his eyes and let it be.

He doesn’t make it to wherever they’re going before his stomach finally rejects the bucking, choppy ground, but at least he manages to aim for an empty bag instead of spewing all over the inside of his poor car.

A big, broad hand splays itself over his back, chafing his burning, oversensitive skin through his shirt, and Michael whimpers through his gagging, hunching his shoulders up against it.

“Okay. Okay. Let it out. Come on, come on.”

It sounds like Alex too, and Michael cuts the effort he was putting into guarding himself from touch, dropping the tension out of his shoulders and letting Alex scrape him raw.

Spitting one last time, Michael rasps out, “Alex.” He only manages the one word, just two syllables, but in the end, it’s the only word that matters.

And Alex says, “It’s me. I’m here. I’ve got you.”

“Stay,” Michael tries. Everything is upside down and inside out, and it may be 2020, he may still remember that much, but he can’t remember if that’s a thing he’s allowed to ask these days.

Alex punches out an exhale. The creak of his hands on the steering wheel sounds five times louder than it should. “I’m here,” he repeats, “I’ve got you.”

Michael lets that lie, leaning back into the seat with his head between his legs.

He loses time, and not to sleep, somewhere between the road and stopping. Opening his eyes feels like running a marathon. Every inch of his skin feels like he’s been run over by ants. He can tell he’s getting worse.

Alex says something, but the words get jumbled up between his ears and his brain. Michael presses his cheek against the icy window to keep his brain from cooking, to get some systems back online.

“—at the cabin. If you have to, but I’ll—no, absolutely not, the car—whatever, but there’s not enough room, and he’s my—”

His voice gets quiet, then a moment or so later, Michael’s door opens up. He’d hit the ground if it wasn’t for Alex’s arm slipping under his arms, dragging him toward the door. The stairs are a puzzle. Alex can’t carry him, so he has to go ahead of him, step by step, so he can grip his forearms bruising-tight and help him, near-dragging, up each agonizing step. The bruises this method leaves on his shins are nothing compared to the fire in his bones.

By the time they get inside, into the air conditioning and the Alexness of being in his cabin, Michael is nearly dead weight. He ragdolls the second Alex puts him on the bed, and it barely registers as he strips off his shoes and socks and prods and pulls and drags him under the blankets. His eyes flutter as Alex lays a cool hand across his forehead and utters a low curse.

Skip, and Alex’s hand is back pressed between his shoulders and a small glass of acetone is under his nose.

“I don’t know, I don’t know what else to give you, and Kyle doesn’t either but Liz says this shouldn’t hurt.”

Michael tries to take a drink but mostly it just ends up in the corners of his mouth and spilling down his front. The second swallow goes a little better, but he waits and he waits and it doesn’t hit his bloodstream like it ought to, just sits caustic and still in his empty stomach. He moans, low and miserable, and Alex gathers him to his chest.

“God.” Alex says on a short, sharp exhale. “Don’t. Don’t do this to me, Guerin. Please. Oh god.”

His lips are cool against Michael’s sweaty forehead, and that’s—that’s not okay, Alex has to be okay, he shouldn’t be so cold, or maybe Michael is just too too hot. If he is, as least he can keep Alex warm.

He knows, he’d have to be more unaware than he is to not _know, _that it’s bad for Alex to be so close, that he could catch whatever is happening to Michael. But Alex’s arms are like steel to Michael’s fever-weak muscles. Pushing him away would be so, so hard, so hard he has to gasp at the thought, eyes burning with unshed tears.

“’Lex,” he manages, “’M sorry. You shouldn’t…”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” Alex says back. His voice rings out like a gong, that absolute certainty in every word even though Michael can feel the quick, cool pulse of his breath against his cheek, a step away from panic.

“Love you,” is what trips out of Michael’s mouth, when what he means is that Alex is so strong, and he’s sorry that he’s putting him through this, he’s sorry.

“You get to tell me that when you can get every syllable out.”

“Love you,” Michael insists, and then Alex’s breaths are more like sobs, and his eyelids are too heavy to hold open.

* * *

Michael forces his eyes open several hours later. There’s a thin border of sunlight edging the thick, heavy curtains. His shirt is gone, and the sheets have been changed around him; he has a vague, swimmy memory of sweating it through in the night as his fever broke and broke and broke and his body raced to keep up. He also remembers voices, remembers being swaddled up in the sound of voices, but there’s no one with him right now.

Alex has been here, though. His favorite mug is on the bedside table, dregs of old tea gumming up the bottom. Buffy, Alex’s grumpy dog, is lying on the chair in the corner, and one of Alex’s jackets is draped over the back of that chair. Michael reaches out for it, but his powers are still as weak as the rest of him, and one of the sleeves barely flutters under his influence.

But he wants it. He’s cold. The blankets are nice, but not as nice as it would be to have something of Alex’s wrapped around his body, to be able to smell him on the collar like he can smell him on the pillow. Everything in this room is Alex up and down, so drenched in his presence that the décor, the drab colors, the nondescript decorations, it all falls away because all Michael cares about is the way Alex has touched every atom of this place.

Michael folds himself upright, swaying badly, making him clutch the bedside table to keep himself from crumpling back to the bed. The world is staying still, and that’s something; he can take a step without the floor tilting away from his feet, but his muscles are so kitten-weak and watery that after a single wobbling step he sinks down to walk on his knees, just in case. The last thing he needs is to crack his head open falling over; his head hurts enough as it is, and he’s already driven Alex from his bed—he doesn’t want to make him clean up blood as well. Especially if whatever this is is in his blood already. God.

It takes years to reach the chair, but as soon as Michael has the fabric in his grasp, it’s like a tiny fraction of the weight lifts off his chest. He’s too tired and achy to interrogate why that is, why the slimmest suggestion of Alex’s presence is enough to soothe him. He has to tug the end of the jacket out from underneath the dog, and she opens one eye and levels him with the most judgmental look he’s ever seen from a dog.

“So I’m not on top of my game,” he mutters to her. The heavy sigh she heaves does _not _make him feel any less judged.

His prize in hand, he drags himself back to bed and curls up as tight as he can get, hugging his knees to his chest so as much of him as possible can be swaddled in the circle made by Alex’s jacket. If only he could make himself smaller and smaller, so all of him would fit in the pocket.

Still grasping for whatever comfort he can get his hands on, Michael tugs the blankets up around himself, making a little nest for himself out of Alex’s bedthings. He doesn’t realize until he’s buried up to his hair in fabric that he has, probably in the middle of the night, completely destroyed Alex’s nice, neat, military-tight bed, not only by being gross and sick and sweaty all over it, but also by moving around so much he’s stripped it down to the fitted sheet and gathered all of it around him.

He swallows down the thickness and soreness of his throat, half sickness, half misery. It’s not that—Alex won’t be _mad, _he doesn’t think, not about something like that, but if he’s disappointed—if Michael has inconvenienced him, if he’s just given him more work, one more thing to worry about, even if it’s just a chore as simple as making the bed, he doesn’t want—

It’s good that Alex isn’t here right now, even if Michael’s chest is aching, pining for him, for a warm and steady arm to cradle his head while he drifts off back to sleep. All it would be is another imposition. Alex doesn’t need that in his life, not when there’s so much to pull him in a hundred directions already. Wherever Alex has gone, whether it’s into work or just somewhere else, Michael hopes that he’s getting some time off from having a sick alien kicking him out of bed.

Being sick is fucking awful. How do humans do this all the time? He wants to crawl into a ditch and lay there until the world ends, and he’s never been less in the mood for hyperbole. There’s lead in his bones heavy enough to send him through the bed and all the way through the floor.

The bed dips, and Michael sticks his head out of the blankets to see Buffy haul herself up and, with a dignified huff, she lays down with her head on his thigh, and goes back to sleep. Gripped with the absurd urge to burst into tears, Michael snuffles a laugh into the crook of his arm, presses his leg back against the dog’s solid weight, and follows her lead, asleep within moments.

* * *

He has this dream, this recurring dream, where he’s on the highway on a summer night, bare feet cut up by the rocks and blistered from the hot asphalt. Max and Isobel are walking ahead of him, but when he opens his mouth to call out to them no sound comes out, and even if it did, he can’t remember their names. All he knows is that he needs to get to them, but even though every step he takes tears at his broken skin and jars in his bones, he never gets any closer, until they’re swallowed up by headlights in the distance, and Michael is alone under a black, starless sky.

* * *

When he wakes up this time, he isn’t alone.

His arm is sprawled out across the bed, the only part of him sticking out of the tight ball of blankets he’s created, and a hand is fixed around his wrist, fingers pressed firmly into the delicate underside, right over his pulse. He doesn’t feel Buffy beside him anymore.

God, his body aches. He feels disgusting, but at least he doesn’t feel like he’s going to die anymore, so that’s a relief. Has he been asleep for five hours or five weeks? He kind of hopes it’s that second one, if only so that maybe his siblings and Maria will have forgotten to be freaking out about him and he can slip back into their lives unnoticed.

“Michael…”

Michael forces open his gummy eyes, and Alex is there, beside the bed; his eyes are closed, but his spine is so straight he can’t possibly be asleep. Michael stays as still as possible so as not to disturb him, just in case.

His face is unlined and placid, but wan, grayish under his normal tone. The stress is screaming from his every pore, and Michael swallows at the warning swell of a returning nausea. His other hand is a loose fist sitting on his thigh; his body is still as a statue, his chest barely moving with every breath. Then, all at once, he exhales, his shoulders dropping, and his eyes open, focusing on Michael’s hand.

“You’re awake,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” Michael replies, tongue stumbling over itself to apologize. “About your bed. If you—or I can call Isobel or something—drive me home, I’ll get out of your hair.”

The words stick in his throat like a clinging burr, but he coughs them up anyway, ragged and bloody. He won’t get in Alex’s way. That’s one thing he’s never, ever wanted—to be a burden. And now here he is. Maybe, if nothing else, he can con Alex into letting him keep this jacket for a while, since Michael doesn’t know where his own has gotten to.

Alex’s mouth presses into a firm line; his brows tilt forward. “I’m not kicking you out, Guerin.”

“You don’t have to. I’m just offering. I’m not exactly the fountain of good times I usually am right now.”

“Do you really think that’s all I care about?”

“I don’t know! It’s just—late, probably, and if you have to work tomorrow—” Fuck. Work. Michael swallows again. Fucking standing all day to work is going to be hell, if it’s even physically possible. But he can’t afford to miss it. He’s been trying to wean himself off the level of acetone he got used to consuming, but tomorrow’s shaping up to be an off the wagon day.

“So? If you’re not better tomorrow, or if you’re,” Alex’s throat bobs, “worse again, we can call Max or Isobel up to sit with you. I’m not abandoning you when you’re sick, Guerin.”

“Don’t call them.” The words fly right out of his mouth. It’s bad enough with Alex, and he’s, well, _Alex. _Max and Iz, they don’t need to see him this weak. Michael doesn’t _want _them to. “I can drive myself in the morning, assuming my truck is here. I’ll get out of your hair—”

“Stop. Stop saying things like that.”

“Like _what.” _His head isn’t on quite straight. Maybe he’s losing threads of the conversation, but Alex’s stress grates on every oversensitive nerve like foil between his teeth. This is why he hates being _taken care of. _He’s an ungrateful sonuva and ends up hurting the people who want to help when it’s no one’s fault but his own and all the gummed-up parts of him that never learned how to function with regular maintenance. It’s _better _if it’s just him on his own, white-knuckling it until he rides out the storm.

Alex shakes his head sharply; his hand jerks from the bed half-up like he was going to run it through his hair, but then it snaps right back down to Michael’s wrist. Michael turns his hand in that grip to feel the callouses on Alex’s palm on that thin little patch of skin where his veins are closest, and the motion has Alex squeezing him tighter.

His eyes squeeze so tight shut too, though. He takes a couple of harsh breaths. “Fuck. I can’t. I can’t do this.”

“Can’t do what?” Michael croaks. Unfair. It’s not fair for Alex to dump gasoline on him when he’s already feeling like wet ashes. He can’t burn at those words right now, can’t light them up to make sure he’s got a scar to remember the moment by. He’s trapped right here, pinned to a board; he’s got _nothing. _

“I can’t,” Alex repeats.

“Don’t make me beg, Alex.”

Those words, as pathetic as they felt on Michael’s tongue, at least get Alex to look him in the eye—a sharp, short look, before his eyes fall away again, fixing somewhere in the vicinity of Michael’s sternum. Speaking is starting to drain energy right out of him. He’s too warm, but just clutches the open sides of his stolen jacket for dear life, like someone might reach over and rip it off of him.

Alex’s hand grasps upward, curled around Michael’s forearm now, strong fingers digging into the muscle underneath the sleeve. “No,” he says. “No, don’t. I. You’re.” He licks his lips. His brow furrows, tight and dark and angry. “You’re.” He tries again. “Taking care of people. I’m no good at it. Knowing what _you _need is even harder. I always get it wrong. But I need to. Take care of you. It’s the only thing I need right now. The past couple days have been…”

“I don’t want to be taken care of. I didn’t ask for it,” Michael protests. It’s a weak attempt, and Alex knows it from the lift in his eyebrow, but he doesn’t comment on the fragile underbelly of Michael’s words, just strokes his hand back down to Michael’s again. 

“Neither of us did. Or have, ever in our lives. Maybe it’s time to try something new? Could be fun.”

“Can you handle my kind of fun, private? Might be too much for you.”

Alex’s mouth finally quirks up into a half-smile at Michael’s goading, and that’s the closest thing Michael’s had to a victory, so he’s going to take it and run.

Alex says, “You want to spar with me while you’re bedridden? That’s a very bold prospect, Guerin.”

“Better that than the other thing, where I lay around acting pathetic.”

And just like that, Alex’s smile is gone. “It’s not pathetic to _get sick. _Don’t—say that about yourself, because I know you’d never say it about Isobel, or Max, or Liz, or Maria—”

_Or me, _he doesn’t say, and Michael wishes he would. Because it’s true. If Alex suddenly got sick—if Michael had to watch him struggle to walk, to breathe, suffering and hurting and no way to stop it or make it any better…he wouldn’t be able to sit calmly by the bed. He wouldn’t be able to joke afterward. He wouldn’t be able to do anything but hold Alex to the bed and be alive with him for hours and hours and hours.

Clearing his throat, Michael says, “Does anyone know what could have happened? I don’t really remember…Liz or Valenti get in here to do science on me or anything?” He touches his tongue to his chapped lower lip, worrying at the stinging skin there.

“No.”

Alex shifts closer, his elbows resting on the side of the bed, Michael’s hand pulled into the warm cradle of his chest. He takes a second to place a soft kiss on Michael’s knuckles, and Michael lets his eyes fall shut.

Alex continues, “You were keeping down fluids, and the acetone seemed to help boost your ability to fight it off somewhat. Or at least it helped you sleep.” He kisses Michael’s hand again and says quietly, “None of us wanted to. Without your consent…the medical stuff. Kyle was ready, if you took a turn for the worse, but it didn’t come to that.”

“You…” Michael has to clear his throat again before he can speak. “You…thank you.”

“I couldn’t stand the thought of you—already being weak, and you had to be scared; I couldn’t stand the thought of you waking up halfway through, and—” His voice breaks off, eyes over-bright. Michael rubs the hand in his, reassuring, grateful.

“Thank you,” he repeats.

Alex’s eyes flick up to meet his, and Michael holds the gaze for as long as Alex lets him, trying to communicate all the full, desperate gratitude in his body. He doesn’t comment as Alex blinks away unshed tears.

Alex straightens his shoulders a bit and says, “As for what could have happened, we’re working on it. Maria is worried sick; she feels responsible.”

“Not her fault. Whether I was drugged or there’s a superbacteria that can get aliens now or it was the position of Jupiter’s moons or some shit.”

“She’s also afraid this means there’s something wrong at the Pony. We’re doing a top to bottom search after hours. Liz has already tested the beer you drank, and it wasn’t tampered with at all. It could have been anything.”

“Iz and Max? Did they have any symptoms?”

Alex shakes his head. “Puts a bit of a damper on your astrological phenomenon theory.”

“Damn. I really thought those moons were out to get me.”

Laughing at his own joke makes him cough a chest-rattling cough, but it’s worth it to see Alex’s face light up with a bit of a smile.

“Where are they, anyway?” Michael says. “I kind of thought Max would be serenading my sickbed or something, to be honest. Or that might have been a nightmare of my fevered mind.”

“He was here for a while, but he got called into work. Isobel stayed longer, but she went home with Maria so she wouldn’t have to be alone. You might give them a call; they’ll be sad they weren’t here when you woke up. But I’ll warn you,” Alex’s smile goes thin and strained, but at least it lingers on his face this time rather than slipping away like oil. “Your family isn’t very happy with me. I basically kidnapped you.”

“You can kidnap me any day.”

“That’s a dangerous statement to make.”

“Mm, I sure hope so.”

“Stop being flirty. You look like roadkill.”

“You sure know how to make a man feel special.”

“Well, I can’t have you out-competing me.”

The easy patter of their words stutters to a halt. Alex’s smile is gone for real now, and it takes half the energy Michael’s been able to muster with it. He shivers a bit, and grabs to pull the covers back around himself.

“That first night,” Alex says. He looks back into Michael’s eyes, but the effort seems to weigh a hundred pounds on his shoulders. “That first night, you said that you…that you love me.”

“Yeah.” Michael takes a shaky breath. “I do. Saying it lucid now, too. I love you.”

“I didn’t say it back. I couldn’t. I’ve thought so many times about how I would, how I’d tell you, but when you said it to me, I couldn’t…and all I can think about was how,” his voice breaks, and Michael shakes off the duvet to reach out with his other hand, which Alex takes, “that could have been the last thing you ever said to me. And I didn’t even say it back.”

“This is gonna sound shitty,” Michael says. He’s still staring at Alex; Alex is the only thing it’s possible to look at. “But I wasn’t really thinking. I said it more for myself than anything else. I wasn’t thinking about how it would affect you, to hear it like that, when I haven’t said it to your face before. But just so you know. I do. I love you. Whether or not you say it back.”

A desperate laugh escapes Alex’s mouth. “How can you just—so easily? I feel it; I go to say it, but I just can’t. I’ve been faced with an entire life without you again and again the past couple days, and now I have you here as a captive audience, and here I am dancing around it. What am I afraid of? It’s you. It’s always been you.”

Michael’s pulse rabbits in his chest. “Alex. It’s okay.”

“It’s _not! _You deserve to hear it; you deserve to know, just like I know. That I’d do anything. That I _would’ve _done anything. Given anything. Because if anything’s going to destroy me, It might as well—”

They inhale at the same time, sucking all the air out of the room, and reflexively, helplessly, Michael jerks on his hands, pulls him in, struggles up half-sitting so their shoulders brush.

“—If anything’s going to destroy me, it might as well be for you.”

“Alex,” Michael breathes. He breathes, the air of him, the body heat, the electric charge, the connection that’s been humming between them since childhood, reforged into a wire strong enough to hold Michael’s bones together. It’s the only time he’s ever wished to be Max—to be able to _show _Alex all this, fill him up with light until there’s no doubt left in his soul.

Alex leans forward, crawling half onto the bed, so he can push his forehead to Michael’s like he’s trying to crawl inside him, his eyes squeezed shut, their hands still tangled up crushed between them.

“Michael, Michael,” he whispers, so Michael holds him until he quiets, falls into Alex holding him in turn, and the two of them rest like that, Alex seeking every part of Michael that’s breathing and beating and alive.

**Author's Note:**

> I figure if acetone is beneficial and some random pollen is malicious there must be other substances that fuck with alien biochemistry! So poor Michael must've come into contact with something that disagreed with him...poor thing ;)


End file.
